Hackers Behind BitMarket Shutdown

Another day, another cryptocurrency exchange destroyed by a hack. This time its BitMarket, a Polish exchange, that has suddenly gone offline.

As Finance Magnates reported yesterday, the trading venue’s website was closed on Wednesday. Anyone trying to access the site’s homepage was presented with a cryptic message saying that the exchange was shutting down because of a lack of liquidity.

But on Thursday a company director, Marcin Aszkielowicza, released a statement providing some more details as to what happened at the exchange. As predicted by some Reddit users on Wednesday, it appears that BitMarket was hacked.

In his statement, Aszkielowicza said that the exchange was hacked in 2017 as a result of which “several users and technical accounts of the stock exchange lost more than 600 BTC.”

The executive laid the blame for the problems this hack has caused at the feet of prior operators of the exchange.

“The persons actually managing the stock exchange at the time, being aware of this immensely difficult situation, left me alone with the problem of a huge deficit,” said Aszkielowicza.

“For the last 2 years I have been doing everything with the whole team to bring the company out of this stalemate.”

“I was not and I am not a crook”

It seems that the exchange director’s efforts were going smoothly for two years but that the recent surge in the price of bitcoin meant the hole that the hackers made in the company’s coffers could no longer be paved over.

“The galloping increase in the cryptocurrency rate forced us often to take unfavorable actions in order to maintain the liquidity of the stock exchange,” said Aszkielowicza.

“Until the last days I was hoping that this catastrophe would be avoided – for hundreds of clients and myself.”

For clients that still want to get to the bottom of what happened at BitMarket, fear not, for Aszkielowicza also said that he plans on revealing all the details to prosecutors in Poland. The exchange director also said that he has “irrefutable evidence” regarding the claims he made in his post.

“I can only ask for forgiveness, patience and the right to defence,” wrote the exchange CEO at the end of his post. “I was not and I am not a crook. I was left alone by my partners, on a sinking ship, naively believing that I would manage to reach the port.”

Paperblockchain.com is your premier source for everything Bitcoin related. We however are not the Bitcoin network itself, and cannot assist with questions unrelated to the paperblockchain.com suite of tools and services. If you need help with general Bitcoin network questions and issues, please visit our Education page and ask questions there for a free and open discussion about Bitcoin with others in the Bitcoin community.